Workshop Report: DAS 2008

Report prepared by:

Hiroshi Sako

Co-chairs:

 

Koichi Kise (Japan)

Hiroshi Sako (Japan)

DAS2008 was co-sponsored by IAPR, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, International Information Science Foundation, Hitachi Ltd., Hitachi Computer Peripherals Co., Ltd., and Osaka Prefecture University, and in cooperation with the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, Japan. The venue was Nara Prefectural New Public Hall, Japan. Nara was the capital of Japan from 710 to 784 AD, and is a beautiful ancient “UNESCO World Heritage” city having many historical shrines and temples. The oral presentations were held at the impressive Noh theatre in the Hall.

The topics of the workshop were algorithms and architectures of document analysis systems. 115 manuscripts were submitted from 21 countries/regions. The program featured 24 oral talks, 56 posters, two IAPR keynote lectures, and two tutorials. In addition, seven extended abstracts and seven demonstrations were presented. There were 119 participants (71 from overseas, 48 from inside Japan), and one unwelcome guest:  Typhoon 13 from the South Pacific.

Two keynote lectures showed recent progress in their R&D fields and important messages toward future digital society and culture:  “Extraction of Text Objects in Video Documents: Recent Progress” by Prof. Rangachar Kasturi (the 2008 President of the IEEE Computer Society, University of South Florida, USA) and “Digital Renaissance — Making Archives, Sharing Wisdoms and Creating Values” by Prof. Toshiro Kamiuchi (University of Florence, Italy, Int. DIS Laboratory Co., Japan).

Two tutorials were organized in conjunction with the workshop: “Statistical and Adaptive OCR—a Hands-On Tutorial with OCRopus” by Prof. Thomas Breuel (Technical University of Kaiserslautern and DFKI, Germany) and “Unlocking the World's Knowledge: The Analysis of Historical Documents” by Dr, Apostolos Antonacopoulos (University of Salford, UK).

In memory of the late Prof. Yasuaki Nakano, the honorary chair of this workshop and the general chair of DAS1998, the IAPR Nakano Award (the best paper award) was given to Georg Buscher and Andreas Dengel, the authors of the paper entitled “Attention-Based Document Classifier Learning”. The Honorable Mention went to Takuma Yamaguchi and Minoru Maruyama, the authors of the paper entitled “Feature extraction for Document Image segmentation by pLSA model”, and to Mudit Agrawal, the substitute presenter of the paper entitled “Super-resolution of Text Images Using Edge-Directed Tangent Field” authored by Jyotirmoy Banerjee and C.V. Jawahar. We are very happy that the presenter in the awarding ceremony was Mrs. Yukiko Nakano.

Traditionally, the DAS workshop has a special discussion session coordinated by Prof. Henry Baird (Lehigh University, USA). This time, we discussed:

· Layout analysis and segmentation (Moderator: Mudit Agrawal, Scribe: Dimosthenis Karatzas),

· Digital libraries and historical documents (Moderator: Simone Marinai, Scribe: Martin Lettner),

· Camera-based DAS (Moderator: Thomas Breuel, Scribe: Seiichi Uchida),

· Adaptive and self-improving DAS (Moderator: Andreas Dengel, Scribe: Pingping Xiu),

· Handwriting recognition (Moderator: Marcus Liwicki, Scribe: Alicia Fornes),

· Multilingual DAS (Moderator: Premkumar Natarajan, Scribe: Chang An),

· Architecture of complete DAS (Moderator: Prateek Sarkar, Scribe: Michael Moll).

Each group confirmed the definition of the topic and discussed solved and unsolved (open) problems. The discussion summary was presented by the moderator or the scribe of each group in the report session.

The information about the final report of the discussion, lecture & tutorial movies, etc. will be announced at the DAS2008 webpage: www.u-pat.org/das08/, soon.

Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks to 103 reviewers, 31 members of the Program Committee, and the members of the Organizing Committee Masakazu Iwamura, Shinichiro Omachi, and Seiichi Uchida) for their various contributions. We are very much looking forward to the next DAS workshop.

Brave DAS2008 participants who kicked Typhoon 13 out of Nara

Tutorials

Mrs. Yukiko Nakano, presenter

Prof. Andreas Dengel,

co-recipient

IAPR Nakano Award for the Best Paper

Materials and Statistics from DAS 2008, including presentation slides and tutorial movies are available at:

 

www.u-pat.org/das08/stats.shtml

The proceedings of DAS 2008 are published by IEEE-CS

and can be found at :

 

ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentCon.jsp?punumber=4669929